Almost every hour, it seems, someone is either announcing for President or announcing they are thinking about running for President. There are dozens of stories a day about new hires at SuperPAC’s, “Scooby Van” road trips, horse race polls in battleground states, and GOP cattle calls in New Hampshire and […] Read more »
Party rules are made to be broken
Will Scott Walker succeed in building up an independent political base and circumventing the invisible primary? Probably not. Will he try to do that anyway? I don’t know, but there are several reasons why it’s plausible to think this might look like a good strategy for a candidate in Walker’s […] Read more »
Why Outside Spending Is Overrated
… While there is little evidence that conservative outside groups were successful in influencing the results of either the presidential election or key Senate contests in 2012, some observers believe that their efforts may have had a greater impact on the 2014 midterm elections, especially in the crucial battle for […] Read more »
Why Judges Tilt to the Right
Lawyers on average are much more liberal than the general population, a new study has found. But judges are more conservative than the average lawyer, to say nothing of the graduates of top law schools. What accounts for the gap? The answer, the study says, is that judicial selection processes […] Read more »
Sharing Polling Numbers on Twitter: Decoding a Mystery
Perhaps the most bizarre electoral news since the midterms is the allegation that Republican operatives and outside groups used clandestine Twitter accounts to share polling data. The Twitter accounts, which had no followers, tweeted polling results for House races in what might have been an effort to circumvent laws that […] Read more »
Republicans Sure Love to Hate Unions
A paradox of American politics is that Republicans take organized labor more seriously than Democrats do. The right sees unions as a mainstay of the left, a crucial source of cash, campaign manpower and votes. … The economic forces working against unions, especially private sector unions – globalization, the shift […] Read more »